Rebecca Mansour: Devout Catholics ‘Inevitably Led Toward Being Like Mother Teresa,’ Devout Muslims Led To Jihad

Breitbart’sSenior West Coast Editor Rebecca Mansour, who is an American of Lebanese Maronite descent, talked about the threat posed to secular Western societies by Islamic extremism in an interview broadcast on Friday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with host Stephen K. Bannon.

“The real tragedy I see is that the world still doesn’t understand the lessons of what is going on here,” Mansour said. “We still don’t quite understand that this is about a religion. It’s not just about social issues in the Middle East. This is about people believing, fervently, in a specific religion.”

“For example, let me put this in perspective,” she continued. “We never really learned the lessons from 9/11, in the sense that we never actually sat down and looked at what motivated the men who flew the planes into the buildings, who flew the plane into that field in Pennsylvania. We never actually sat down and looked at why they were motivated to do this.”

As a resource, Mansour recommended a book from an author who did take a long, hard look at those motivations: Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers, Who They Were, Why They Did It, by Terry McDermott.

“In particular, let’s look at the hijacker who was from Lebanon,” she suggested. “This man grew up in a completely secular family. It was a family of Sunni Muslims, but they did not practice their religion at all. In fact, he was educated at a Catholic school — he didn’t even realize that the was Muslim for a long time. He became devout only after he was attending school in Germany, and he started going to the mosque that Mohammed Atta was going to.”

“It was because he was displaced — he was in a foreign culture, a foreign country, and he wanted to fit in,” she explained. “And he gravitated toward this mosque, and that was where he became radicalized. So the issue here is devoutness.”

Mansour argued that “moderate Muslims” are not particularly devout practitioners of their faith, but “if you are a devout Muslim, you are inevitably led towards jihad.”

“If you’re a devout Catholic, you’re inevitably led toward being like Mother Teresa,” she said. “That’s the key issue that nobody really wants to address here. It is about devoutness. That is what causes jihadism.”

Mansour feared this was a difficult idea for Western leaders to grasp, because “we no longer take religion seriously, so we can’t understand that there are actually people who do take religion seriously.”

As an example, she cited President Obama describing the Paris massacre as an offense against “the universal values we all share.”

“Clearly, not all of us share these values,” Mansour said. “Of course, the values he was alluding to are the natural moral law that is the basis of all Western civil society — that teach all human life is precious, that human beings have inherent dignity and rights. This, unfortunately, is not something that all cultures and all ideologies accept the same way.”

Even more unfortunately, according to Mansour, Western leaders are busy running down their own culture, “deliberately flouting and denouncing the worldview that gave us these values – which, by the way, is the Judeo-Christian worldview”… while the Islamist world-view, rooted in “domination, dominance, and submission,” is “gaining ground.”

“While the West is rejecting the worldview that made it what it is, we are left unable to defend ourselves against this rising, ascendant, militant worldview that is poised to destroy everything that Christendom built,” she warned.

Mansour found it unsurprising that the Left would rather talk about “climate change” than a militant ideology that’s actually killing people, because it’s easier for them to believe that the greatest threat facing the world today is “a vengeful Mother Nature, outraged by the excesses of capitalism, than something as old-fashioned as a religion, a religious belief that is dominant, militant, that goes against their multi-cultural thinking.”